tl;dr. We'll be introducing a week-long gap between the tagging of the source release and the release announcement to allow providers of binary distributions to get their builds together. Hello everyone! While Austin and I try to produce binary distributions for as many of the major platforms as we can, we are of course unable to support everything. Thankfully, we are lucky to have a number of reliable contributors who consistently provide builds for those platform that we can't handle ourselves. These include, Karel Gardas, who provides Solaris, OpenBSD, and Linux builds for a variety of platforms Páli Gábor János, who provides FreeBSD builds Jens Petersen, who ensures that GHC is well-represented on Redhat distributions Gershom, Jason Dagit, who handle build of the Haskell Platform on many platforms Randy Polen, who handles building of the Haskell Platform on Windows Herbert Valerio Riedel, who handles AIX builds They all deserve our thanks. However, our release process has until now not treated their efforts on an equal footing with the binary distributions produced by GHC HQ. In an attempt to fix this we're going to try changing the timing of GHC releases, * The source release will be tagged and tarballs pushed to a staging area * We will soon thereafter notify the binary distribution builders and ghc-devs@ * Everyone will go to work on their binary distributions * One week after the source release is tagged the release artifacts will be pushed to downloads.haskell.org and the release publicly announced. We hope that this will remove some of the confusion from the current process while ensuring that all platforms have the potential for support on the day of the release. We'll be trying this for 8.0.1-rc3 and the final release. If all goes well we'll continue this policy in future releases. Cheers, - Ben